


about grace

by romancandles



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romancandles/pseuds/romancandles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It will heal," says Aramis. "Have faith."</p><p>"I have," says Porthos. (pre-series)</p>
            </blockquote>





	about grace

**Author's Note:**

> as ever, this is a fanwork for fans; please do not share with those involved with the making of the musketeers.

In the last dark minutes before sunrise, in the woods outside Chartres with a fine lace of frost on the ground like a petticoat, while a wounded brother sleeps nearby, Aramis pulls Porthos close, or maybe he steps close, and reaches into Porthos’s trousers. It makes him jump, flinch almost, against Aramis’s cold hand, the slow warming. Aramis’s eyes are dark and intent, darting between his hand and Porthos’s face, but he’s steady, methodical the way he gets cleaning his weapons, breath hot against Porthos’s mouth. His hands are big, but also rough, which Porthos should’ve guessed, but hadn’t because — well, because he hadn’t thought to. 

Chill creeps in when Aramis steps back, wipes his hand on the ground. It comes back dirty, wet with bits of dead winter leaves and soil. His cheeks are flushed, from the cold maybe, and his secret half-smile says something in language Porthos doesn’t understand. Above them, the sky is turning a flat winter white. 

“Need to head back,” says Aramis, as if he just happened on Porthos in the woods. “We were meant to ride at sunrise.”

Porthos nods. “Right,” he says. His voice sounds coarse. Aramis pauses, like perhaps he means to say something, or he holds himself still for a second and Porthos fills in the gap, but turns away and something shifts, like a swell of rain wiping the tether between clean away. His retreating footsteps make a light crackle on the frost. 

*

Porthos joins the Musketeers because his captain puts in a good word for him, and old friend of Treville’s from their de Medici rebellion glory days. “You stay, you’ll rot here,” he says when Porthos balks at returning to Paris, “they need men badly and you’re meant for better.” Porthos tries to maintain some measure of offense, but he left Paris in the first place because he’s a sloppy card cheat when he’s drunk, picked a direction once his back was against the wall and kept on walking until he was heaving up sail on the ocean. The Spanish sea was good for him: warm, wide open, and endlessly blue, like a perfect summer sky, and tightly packed with ne'er do wells like himself desperate to trade the same franc back in forth for days that stretch into months. He nearly lost his life twice -- once in a dispute that didn’t concern him but involved a fellow sailor, a stolen relic, and a beautiful woman, the other another in an ugly fit temper that nearly got him hanged. 

He left Paris arrogant, angry, and scrawny, returns only two of those things. Only the Paris he returns to is not the one he left -- high palace walls, gilded tapestries, and green, fanciful gardens large enough to house buildings. This Paris is balanced on some fine knife-edge, people out in their best dress to see the King and Queen pass, indelicately eager at the funeral march for a company of fallen soldiers. 

Porthos is a stranger and -- of course, as ever -- foreign. The other recruits are mostly green and young, early career soldiers born the second and third sons of meager-landed families with ties enough to the king to warrant sponsorship. They’re a ramshackle, ungainly bunch -- carted in from all over France after a Spanish raid in the east leaves twenty commissions available. They don’t say much to Porthos; he does his best to ignore them unless he’s facing one in the training yard. 

His second week, a showy peacock with a southern accent challenges him to a friendly competition -- for glory and, of course, wine, he says -- and whips him soundly in a flourish of artful jabs and parries with one hand behind his back the whole time. “My,” he says, sheathing his sword, Porthos flat on his back in the mud, “you’ve got power.” He breathes out long and low through his mouth, hands braced on his thighs, sweat dampening the open collar of his shirt. 

*

The garrison is small but Paris is large, an inversion of a the tight quarters of the ship in the infinite glitter of the ocean when any space felt like empty air. It leaves Porthos adrift for long afternoons and evenings when his fellow new recruits are stretching their legs in the city, running a regiment-wide test of both blacksmiths and brothels. 

With the price of leather and weapons coming out of his meager savings and advanced wages, he spends his nights ensconced in his quarters, more of a low-ceilinged, dark cupboard into which three narrow cots have been laid abreast. A lone dirty window no larger than a the span of two hands with a pressure fracture transversing its diagonal faces a dingy stone wall. The light that filters through even when the sun is high is hardly enough to navigate the short distance between his bed and door. He burns precious oil struggling over Bible verses like a child. Porthos gets no pleasure from reading, forces himself to practice nightly the way a wealthy boy would Latin or Greek at the behest of a stern father. It comes poorly and slowly to him, this trick of memorization and he curses, curses his wasted youth, the Court, his fellow musketeers to whom such things come so naturally. 

A yawning creak at the door warns him to glance up when a shadow darkens it. Aramis, the lesser son of an even lesser merchant, temporarily relieved of active duty pending inquiry, with his pointed face and glittering eyes, always ready with a smile and a compliment for bruised egos. He fits amongst the men here, content to melt into crowds that he’s nonetheless always in the middle of, a silver-tongued snake amongst the proud, guileless cocks of their ranks. 

“Surely God’s word will hold ‘til morning,” says Aramis, leaning a shoulder against the door frame. He’s half-dressed, in shirtsleeves, holed up for long hours with Treville in the captain’s office. 

“No rest for the wicked.”

“How wicked can one be, buried here for days on end?” Aramis makes a show of looking around expansively, one hand raised like a showman. “It seems to me that wickedness must be sought.” 

Porthos smiles ruefully, against his will. “And paid for, I’m told.”

Aramis scoffs. “Only in the dead of winter, my friend, and even then Paris is alive with wickedness if only you know where to look.” Aramis has a theatrical air, something that seems half unstudied charm and half artifice with sweeping gestures and tall tales, as if he read about someone in a book and dedicated his life to embodying that character. 

Porthos gambles away a week’s worth of earnings that night to Edouard, Aramis at his shoulder calling for more wine, another round of beer, until abruptly he’s gone, vanished, and Porthos is stuck begging the madame for a bit of credit, just a short extension, please madame, you have my word. 

*

Truth be told, there’s little Porthos loves more than a competition, which has in the past made him a shockingly selfish partner, but also terribly focused. He needs this commission, which gives him little room for error in this jumbled regiment of half-trained soldiers and least-loved sons, who initially ignore him as they might ignore a horse or an ass or a bit of scenery, then deliberately ignore him once it becomes clear he’s not. It becomes his mission to stalk the garrison yard, looking for a sparring partner because he knows the importance of making an impression early. What he lacks in formal training, he makes up for in sheer strength, dispatching one by one tumbling into the mud under Treville’s watchful eye until the yard is gray with twilight.

“Careful,” says Aramis, from the supper table where he’s been taking his pistol apart and cleaning it meticulously for the last hour. “These men will be your brothers. Don’t want to humiliate them too badly at the offset.” Aramis stays around the garrison more often than not in the daylight hours, watching the training of the new recruits with an intensity Porthos finds surprising, somewhat incongruous. 

“If they’re my brothers, they’ll forgive me,” says Porthos. 

Aramis rights his pistol, stands. He favors his left side, gingerly hefting himself up with his swordhand. His sleeve looks newer at the shoulder, stripped of the spaulder that normally adorns it. Right now it looks bare, like the dark spot on a sun-bleached wall where a precious painting used to hang. “It’s not always about honor,” he says, soft, “sometimes it’s about grace.”

“I think I’ll leave grace to God,” says Porthos. Aramis shrugs, slings the gun into his belt. 

He sups with the rest of the regiment rarely, thin on coin and either side holding itself apart. Aramis, who gives the impression of easy friendship yet unnerves something in Porthos by his calculation, invites him out when he knows Porthos would rather not, makes room for him at midday, as if Porthos is some private project he's taken upon himself or, worse, been assigned. "Move lads, Porthos has arrived,” he says, gleeful, with the knowing tone of a jester. “I have already begun regaling them with tales of my adventures, but I shall re-tell from the beginning for your benefit.”

“I’m flattered,” says Porthos, voice dry as bone, where he’s squeezing between Leon and Edouard, two lads with nearly identical noses like sharp hooks, one thin with yellowed skin stretched over his bones, the other broad and flat. 

Aramis holds court the way a prince might, or not a prince but a hungry politician, always glancing at Porthos to ensure he’s paying attention, including him in his easy smiles. He draws the others in as though they’re intimate friends, asks after their mothers and mistresses, entertains philosophical discussions on the merits of Paris brothels where credit is accepted with the same gravity he might the the political machinations of the Habsburg empire. Once, he asks Porthos about sailing, to which he receives a clipped reply. "I'd make an awful sailor," he continues and Porthos nods. There's no place on a ship for Ararmis’s type of flamboyant vanity. "So still, for days on end, alone with my thoughts." He sounds wistful though, fingers fanning over the rough grain of the table, like he's stretching against the imagined confines.

*

An official inquiry into the Savoy fiasco brands its leader grossly incompetent even in death and one of its only two survivors a traitor against the crown. Even in borderlands, an unprovoked attack on a royal guard cannot go unanswered; Porthos accompanies Treville to fetch the Spanish ambassador to the Louvre to face the king. The man is dark-eyed with sallow skin that sags at his jaw and utterly terrified, cowering in the face of his escort. He looks small in his finery, which upon closer examination is greasy and worn; he wears the face of a man unprepared to meet his maker. 

His Majesty is younger up close than Porthos expected, a curious mix of high-strung fear and open curiosity, like a child desperate to learn the ugly truths of life but not quite ready to face them, searching for approval in the faces of his court. The Spaniard grovels, openly sobbing, face blotchy at the feet of the court, his arms spread open in front of him. There’s heat in the air like the familiar burn before a good fight, the thrill of a spectacle, the thirst for vengeance for its own sake. A strange light blooms in the eyes of the court, like a ghastly spectre. Porthos looks away. 

Treville is white-faced, lips together in a thin line. He looks tired, but thrumming with the still blue heat at the center of a flame. 

“They’ll hang him, yeah?” asks Porthos once they’re outside, in the crisp early morning heat, golden sun above them. 

Treville cants his head to one side, squinting out to the gardens. “With so little evidence? Twenty dead is hardly worth a war.” He takes a long breath, calming. “The King will extract a handsome fine, I would think.” 

“How many lost lives for a livre these days?” asks Porthos before he can bring himself to heel and Treville gives a short bark of furious laughter, shot through and frayed at the edges. The air is heavy with pollen, giving a golden, warm cast to the light. “Captain,” he says, voice rough, “I’m sorry for your loss. For the loss of your men.”

Treville looks at him then, suddenly decades older and very frail in the way he holds himself, like the weight of those souls are crumbling him into a fine dust. “Thank you.” 

There’s cake at the garrison and a edge of bloodlust in the way the men crowd together, drinking a bit harder, playing a bit rougher for their overdue vengeance. Aramis endures the restoration of his spaulder with a hand over his heart and one hand splayed to his audience. For justice, for brotherhood, for the king in his infinite wisdom. Would love to stay but has appointments to keep, he says backing out of the yard, that involve a bit less ceremony and a bit more action.

In the first breath of dawn, when the roosters have not yet crowed, on his way down to the stables he finds Aramis with a stretch of embroidered silk tied about his head, misbuttoned in his own doublet, flipping a coin in one hand, catching it in the other. “Anybody sitting here?” asks Porthos and Aramis gives him a flat, hard-edged smile. They play cards for denarii as the sky fades into a purple-blue to orange to pink and the stars wink out one by one until Serge arrives with breakfast and a paws a warm, heavy hand at Porthos’s shoulder. 

*

Porthos is assigned the world’s dullest detail, following a visiting duke around the wealthiest homes of Paris at no closer than fifteen paces as the man gets progressively sloppier. His back is to the window in a light-filled sitting room with highly perfumed men and women in gilded brocade, artfully decorated frangipane tartlets enough to feed an army, and enough brandy to float a barque when a gun misfires; the man loses two fingers. There’s a brief moment in which it’s unclear who fired the weapon and to what end, just an ugly, bitten-off bang and a high-pitched scream reverberating between Porthos’s temples. 

“I’ve always thought the reason for ten,” says Aramis, holding a bloody rag to the trembling man’s hand, “is to make up for the ones you lose along the way.” He looks prenaturally still and focused, like a stern father to scared child, or a predator to prey. The duke is a frail man with bright spots of high color in in his temples and nose. A shower of rust-colored droplets like a sea spray decorates the high-backed sofa, a slick steak from someone’s heel across the floor. 

Porthos has built his castle on the foundation of others’ underestimation, but there’s something particularly galling about having Aramis watch him as though he’s a delinquent child and then prove the captain right when some drunken idiot misloads a pistol. 

“Or,” says Aramis, “perhaps you’re meant to be watching me.” There’s an arc of blood across his face and flaked in the half-moons of his nails. 

They pass the night in a low-lit hotel, spending their money on cheap beer instead of food to stretch the night out longer. He teaches Aramis to pull a coin out of an ear, which Aramis flubs on their pock-marked barmaid with a shameless, regretful half-smile and gives her the coin for her trouble. Porthos watches the exchange, suddenly breathless, not at Aramis as he sits before Porthos now, sharp-eyed and intimate, but the memory of him, straight-backed, the resolute dip of his chin, the surety of his breath, with a smear of blood in the hollow of his cheek.

*

In the first blush of summer Edouard takes a kick in the head from a horse that knocks him to the ground. He gets up, dusts himself off, and falls dead into his supper three hours later. The funeral is a dreary affair in a stretch of unseasonable warmth, poorly attended, and Porthos feels the the twenty crosses marking not-yet-overgrown mounds, barely in the ground long enough to warp, their grain still honeyed and raw. 

“Tough, to go like that,” says Porthos later, over wine and hot stew. The sun is still high enough, but Porthos feels exhausted, heavy with the slack, tired sorrow of the man’s mother, Treville’s even timbre reviewing the sparse contents of yet another short life. “One minute you’re up, the next you fall down dead in your soup.”

“You think there’s no honor in soup?” says Aramis and it sounds like a joke but there’s something about the tension in his cheek, about the way the shadows fall on his face that makes Porthos suddenly sure it’s not, that this is a test. 

“I think,” says Porthos, slowly, wishing he had a moment longer to collect his thoughts, “that honor in death is reflected in how one lives.”

Aramis turns the corners of his mouth down, slowly, like he’s considering a business proposition, shakes his head when the barmaid comes by with more wine. Porthos has known many men, but rarely has he met one who spoke so much in the language of smiles, as if he never learned to use his face to its full range of expressions.

“You’re wrong,” he says, flat but not unkind, “all men die the same.”

*

The sea is a stormy gray, waves crashing against the rocks in some calamitous battle. It’s a five day journey from Paris in high summer sun, with meals financed by the crown making it bearable. It seems quite a bit of work for tax evasion, but Porthos isn’t in the business of questioning the royal edict, until the man pulls a knife on Aramis and Porthos is forced to skewer him. 

“All right, then?” asks Aramis, knees tucked up near his elbows, feet bare. Three boys in breeches and muddy shirtsleeves caper over the rocks closer to the waves, searching for small, well-fortified critters, the kind with thick shells and very little tender meat, more work than they’re worth for their vulnerable insides. A particularly vicious wave nearly fells one; he comes out of the wave sputtering, clinging to the face of an unforgiving stone. His fellows help him scrabble upright, shouting.

“Hardly the first man I’ve put down.”

“The first with the King’s blessing, I would think,” says Aramis. “You miss it?” he asks, nodding to the ocean. The air is heavy with a fine sea mist, Porthos feels damp at his collar.

“No,” says Porthos. Then, “The structure, maybe. There’s no room for ego because the alternative is drowning.” Aramis’s mouth quirks, a half acknowledgment of the hit. 

They’re not quite friends, Porthos would say, but the way they often fall together feels inevitable. The ranks are closely knit and, for all of Aramis’s strange hypnotic ability to transform hours into mere minutes under his attention, sometimes Aramis seems as alien as Porthos himself feels. One heavy summer day, Treville calls him aside to comment on his lack of forethought. “You have good instincts, but you’re too reactive,” he says. “As a representative of the king, you’ll need to use more caution or it’ll cost you.”

Porthos pauses, parses the criticism for the thread of hope. “If I’m a representative of the king,” he clarifies. 

Treville gives him a hard look that reminds Porthos of his early youth, when he was always too eager, too bold, always asking for more than he thought he could get. “As a representative of the king,” he repeats. The next morning, when the sun a pink and gold shimmer on the horizon, he rides out toward Brittany with Aramis, spaulder stiff and smelling like freshly cut leather, rubbing a deep chafe into his clavicle. 

*

“Impossible,” says Porthos. “You’ve fixed it somehow.”

Aramis smiles the indulgent smile of one who knows he has the upper hand. “You’ve caught me. I’ve actually trained small woodland creatures to shoot for me.” Porthos is going to throw him to the ground and smother him with his own hat. Then they’ll see who’s smiling. 

It’s a fine, clear day, the kind that calls for riding for the sake of riding, leaving the city walls for open farmland and a thin copse of trees heavy with fruit. Porthos has just seen Aramis pop off a series of shots at nearly one hundred yards and strike true each time, the tree to which the target is affixed sending up a shower of splinters. It is, without a doubt, the finest shooting Porthos has ever seen, a fact to which Aramis is clearly not blind. It is, he thinks as he watches Aramis line up another shot, his patience, the way he breathes into the shot as if its an extension of him, holds it with an uncharacteristic stillness. 

The sun is high and hot. Porthos takes a drink from his waterskin, then holds it up appraisingly. “If I walked out there,” he says, holding it aloft, “you could shoot this off my head.”

Aramis looks at the bladder, then at a spot above Porthos’s head. He can tell Aramis badly wants to say yes. “At this distance, I couldn’t risk it,” he admits. 

“But from this distance,” says Porthos, taking a few steps back, gesturing between them. It can be no more than twenty yards.

Aramis looks insulted. “Of course.” He pauses a beat, then smirks. “Is that an invitation?”

“If I wasn’t convinced I’d die of thirst, it would be,” says Porthos. It occurs to him that Aramis must have had a destination in mind all along, had known they’d wind up here with Aramis’s smug smile and Porthos shaking his head in disbelief. It’s difficult to be truly annoyed in the face of Aramis’s obvious joy and there’s something warm in Porthos’s chest at the thought that Aramis would choose him to show off for. 

“Pity,” says Aramis. “I’d trust you.”

“I’ll remember that.”

*

Although Porthos is no stranger to pain, he’s never gotten used to it, the way some men do, never found comfort in its arms. A routine arrest goes awry when the man’s mistress and her family ambush them in a narrow wood some fifteen miles outside the village. Aside from the patriarch, the men are little more than armed farmhands; a deadly combination of drink, inexperience, and thirst for vengeance makes the whole ordeal drag on to cost more lives and trees than it should. It ends as quickly as it started, promises of love, forgiveness, and eventually money shouted through the trees. If Porthos is permitted to say so, the lady makes out like a bandit. 

“Well,” says Aramis, a few hours later, “that could have gone better.” This close, Porthos can clearly see the where the lines are beginning to set at the corners of his eyes and mouth, the slightly uneven tuft at his jaw he missed trimming his beard. 

“Do you think so,” says Porthos, voice like ice. “I’m blind.”

“You may very well be if you keep flinching.” Porthos has grown rather used to Aramis’s voice, would even admit to finding his easy, intimate tone comforting under certain circumstances, but now, with a needle mere inches from his eye and sharp pull at this cheek, he’s less easily distracted. “The more you move, the worse the scar. It’s—” here his voice catches on something jagged, “It should’ve been sewn hours ago.” Aramis, face bloodless, insisted on being clear of the woods before dark, Porthos riding with a linen kerchief over his eye, their idiot cargo suddenly solicitous at the idea of a hanging. 

“I’ve long given up hope of great beauty.” He finds his tongue thick with expensive spirits that Aramis charmed out of the innkeeper’s wife. The chuff of Aramis’s laugh is warm against his lips.

“It will heal,” says Aramis. “Have faith.”

“I have,” says Porthos. Perhaps he overreacted, he thinks distantly, to the pull of the needle, Aramis’s warm fingers holding his head in place, the steady even pressure against his cheek. That’s just his way, to fill up the silence, to saturate a room.

Aramis gives him a sharp look, warm but tinged with exasperation. “Close your eyes, Porthos.”

*

They spend two days tailing a Dutch tradesman as he ducks in and out of magistrate’s homes. The man wears favors a coat of a deep forest, the color of evergreens in a frozen winter, where he keeps a small rectangular book with a gilded crucifix on the cover. Treville wants the book, for reasons unknown, and the trader, Aramis says, defeated, has yet to let it leave his person even in slumber. He hardly drinks or whores -- they try both Dauphine, an ample cherub of a lass, and Aramis himself -- or gambles, keeps quietly to himself each night in a darkened corner of his inn. This frank display of virtue is offputting of the Dutch as a whole. A man needs faults to inspire a bit of trust. Still, reasons Porthos, if he won’t let the thing go, they’ll simply have to take it from him. 

“You won’t pass unnoticed,” says Aramis. Aramis, overly familiar, touches the studding on Porthos’s doublet, his stiff, high collar, thumb lingering at the line of Porthos’s jaw. 

“Watch me,” says Porthos. 

Paris streets are crowded places, putrid waste, thin animals, and dirty supplicating children always underfoot, with every haggard woman and man trying to offload a trinket for luck, a bit of pastry to fill your belly, your fortune for two sous. Most people -- people like Aramis, he amends, because there’s no use pretending otherwise -- think the trick of pickpocketing is the agility and desperation of the young and very poor who are indistinguishable from one drab tunic to the next, because Aramis was born assuming every eye in the room was on him. But Porthos knows it’s in the subtle draw of breath, the low slope of the shoulder, the tip of the chin to the ground that erases a person from memory, lets one’s eyes skip over a man so that person fades into the background, ceases to exist entirely.

He’s spent his entire life learning to throw his shoulders back, a head above the rest, to laugh louder and longer and more roughly than anyone else in the room, to fill a space just by breathing into it, but he didn’t always and it’s not something a body just forgets. It’s a bit like the first time he swam, the panic at not being able to breathe, his body unable to perform its single function of staying alive, reaching back into the cobwebs of a locked room and not shuddering at the feathery touches of something brushing past him in the dark.

Porthos catches the trader just before he reaches his horse, jostles against him in the crowd. The man is annoyed, remembers to reach by rote to check his purse, mouth drawn up in a tight bud against the filth, the viscous muck of Paris streets seeping through the soles of boots.

“Where did you learn to do that?” asks Aramis, delighted, filled with open, honest appreciation. It’s that quality that makes Aramis very good at engendering confidence and very bad at picking pockets. He runs his thumb along the worn pages of their quarry, filled with a hurried, cramped script. Porthos can make out dates and numbers, little else. 

“It’s amazing what a person picks up in a lifetime,” says Porthos, closing that dark room with his full weight against the rusted out hinges. He carefully fastens his spaulder and swordbelt, lets his dull heart, shuttered and gasping, expand to fill his chest.

*

Porthos nearly turns back twice. Treville asked after him, Porthos imagines saying when he knocks, calls out. It occurs to Porthos exactly when Aramis answers that he may not be alone, although he is, rooms lit by a cheerful lamps to extend the day against the ever-lengthening night. 

The quarters Aramis keeps are unexpectedly spare: a narrow bed, two low stools at an uneven table with an unsteady leg, a dark cabinet with a wash bin, a stack of books on loan from, in Ararmis’s words, “a patroness.” There’s a leafy garden where the hostess grows herbs; the grassy scent of chervil and tarragon perfume the air. It seems overly quiet, like a curtain has dropped around them. At the garrison, someone is always moving or shouting or fighting; Porthos lives by the pounding of boots on the steps, of bursts of raucous drunken laughter, the ring of a sword striking its opponent. 

Aramis’s eyes are narrow and lips wine-dark at their seams. “Stay then,” he says, when Porthos mentions the quietness. He sounds half asleep already, naked from the waist up, a concession to the oppressive heat. The sounds of Paris at night filter in from the open window, through the thin walls: the low murmuring of men in a bar, the wail of a baby, a dog barking. 

“I wouldn’t want -- if you’ll have me.” Porthos corrects himself midstream, watches Aramis’s eyes flutter closed.

“Always,” says Aramis, mouth turning up a bit at the edges. 

It’s a tight fit and neither of them is small -- they don’t have to touch but Porthos scrapes his toes against Aramis’s feet anyway, feels the way the sheet shifts with Aramis’s deep even breaths, his face lax as he drifts off. Porthos almost stops himself but at the end his willpower is no match for the temptation. He skims a hand tentatively along Aramis’s waist just below his ribs, over a hot, raised scar, the vulnerable pink of newly knitted skin dog-legging along his back. 

*

An early snowfall catches the woods unaware, trees outside of Chartres still vibrant with only just-fading greenery. In a highway skirmish, Leon takes a blow to his upper leg that nearly leaves him a eunuch. Porthos shoves a kerchief into his mouth, brackets him in his arms, lets Aramis wipe the wound clean. It bleeds profusely, wide and shallow, soaks through Leon’s breeches and seeps into the the ground. Aramis’s face is still and focused. Leon trembles in Porthos’s arms, giving short, shaking breaths. He starts to pray, says he keeps back wages in his mattress he’d like Porthos to deliver to his sister. Aramis smiles, blood on his fingers, his breath curling in white clouds in the air.

“Don’t start confessing all your sins,” says Porthos to Leon’s dirty hair, “although we’ll keep your bed in mind for next time we’re low on coin.”

Leon laughs then, tears leaking down his white face. Aramis sits back on his heels. 

In the the flickering light of the fire, Leon in the exhausted sleep of the near-dead, Aramis threads the string of his necklace through his fingers, one way and then the other, over and over again. The slowing snow falls gently, almost aimlessly in fat wide-spaced flakes, hissing out of existence before it can reach the fire. “The worst wasn’t the dead,” he says, voice low and distant, as if he’s describing something he heard happened long ago to someone else, “but the ones begging to be saved. They died pleading to live. One by one.”

"What happened then?" asks Porthos. Aramis stares into the fire, profile thrown in shadow. 

“It was silent and I was alone.”

They’re silent as the fire burns down to dull embers, Porthos achingly alert of the jump in Aramis’s pulse at each shudder of gentle wind in the trees, the distant rustle of an animal, the shadowy sound of an owl alighting on a branch. When the first stretches of light begin to relieve the darkness, Porthos stretches his legs, rises to get his blood flowing. Aramis follows.

He thinks about it later, tucked into his bed back in Paris, blocking out the dull buzz of snores, Aramis’s fingers on him, the way his free hand clutched at Porthos’s clothes, the way he nosed at Porthos’s cheek when his breath hitched, Porthos swaying into Aramis’s touch -- or did he? It all scatters away, a mixture of truth and dream, like fragments of ash in a draft. 

*

Aramis smuggles them into a ball to which they have not strictly been invited through an elaborate farce he makes Porthos practice in the street, yet ultimately boils down to smiling endearingly. It strikes Porthos when they enter how many people Aramis simply seems to know, as he guides Porthos by his elbow and keeps up a low commentary of collected, seemingly obscure facts about each person they meet. 

“Aramis,” he says, bowing deeply to women who know him perfectly well, “of the King’s Musketeers.” Porthos shakes his head. It’s a miracle that Paris isn’t teeming with sly, dark-eyed children. 

A lovely woman with blond curls piled into an elaborate bouquet asks after his meal, did he find the veal too tough, oh how strange he had the poultry since she recalled ordering suckling pig. Porthos, finding himself flat-footed and cursing Aramis’s reptilian ability for camouflage, says, “I’m afraid I arrived too late for supper, madame…”

“Comtesse Ninon de Larroque,” she says firmly. 

Porthos bows. “Porthos,” he says. 

“Of the King’s Musketeers?” she asks, a touch of a familiar cadence to her voice. “I’ve heard.” Whether she’s heard of Porthos himself or simply been the lucky recipient of the expression remains unclear. “I believe we have a common acquaintance.”

“He’s more like a charge, I’d say.” She laughs, the music changes, and he asks for a dance because she so clearly wants him to. When they join the ring, it becomes obvious early that she’s more skilled, but he’s hardly the worst. Court dancing feels overly complicated to Porthos, one of those rare things he prefers way it was done when he was a child. He thinks of them rarely now, but remembers that Flea loved to dance, loudly, raucously, with her whole body. 

The Comtesse thanks him, a warm note in her voice; Porthos assures her the pleasure is his entirely. Aramis appears out of the crowd like a bright-eyed sprite. He pauses when he spies them and Porthos sees his face still as he runs through and ultimately disregards any number of subjects they might be discussing. In the space of a breath, a number of expressions flicker in the curve of his mouth and the glitter of his eye. By the time the Comtesse has followed Porthos’s gaze, Aramis is wearing a sharp-toothed smile, like an extra skin he just happened to have brought with him tonight.

“I believe,” he says, approaching them with arms spread, “I have found the handsomest couple here. The rest pale in comparison.” Aramis comes close enough that the soft leather of his doublet grazes Porthos’s fingers.

“Your friend was kind enough to treat me to a dance,” says the Comtesse, dropping her hand from Porthos’s arm. 

Aramis’s face lights. “I taught him everything he knows.” It is, unfortunately, an accurate assessment. “The steps,” he amends. “The ability, less.”

“Aramis has to count the steps aloud,” translates Porthos and Aramis tilts his head, rueful, when the Comtesse laughs, bringing one fine-boned hand to mouth, before taking her leave. Aramis places both hands on Porthos’s shoulder, looks him in the eye, deadly serious. He has provoked the ire of a Red Guard by way of a common paramour and they must retreat, posthaste. 

“I could learn to dance,” says Aramis, hand warm at Porthos’s back in the dark as they walk to the stable where their horses are tied. The courtyard is sprawling, the clouds picking up pinks and purples from the lantern light.

“You have other talents,” says Porthos, catches his mistake too late when Aramis laughs.

“You’ve heard, have you?” says Aramis, pulling them both up short, hands resting on Porthos’s forearms. Porthos searches his face for seams, for cracks revealed where his hair tumbles down over his temples, in the fine grain of his eyelashes. He doesn’t understand how Aramis can be two people at once, where Porthos locks each of his selves into airless rooms to whither away in the catacombs of some dusty memory. He thinks of Aramis’s mouth brushing his cheek, aware of the weight of each of Aramis’s fingers on him like heavy stones. The Comtesse’s front door is thrown open with a crack; light and laughter spill into the courtyard, magnified against the stone. 

Porthos steps back. “All of Paris has heard, I fear.” Aramis blinks once, twice, shakes himself.

*

It’s late in the month, which means the goodwill of their hosts is beginning to wear thin. Porthos bows out early from a card game when the barmaid swoops in to collect his winnings with a cheeky, narrow-eyed grin. Aramis puts his hand to his heart and gasps; she pours them a final tankard of beer to split, gives them a coin to pay for it. 

When they take their leave, Aramis is telling him the story of how he first learned to shoot, the kickback nearly taking out his eye and blinding him, yet Porthos fails to hear the details -- embellished, he distantly notes, from the first time he heard it in the spring -- as they wind through the wet streets shoulder to shoulder, Aramis’s arm warm across Porthos’s shoulder. The moon is bright, nearly full, and the streets are largely empty. 

“I’ll be off then,” says Porthos, watching Aramis light a lamp. It flickers, dies, then grows steadily brighter, throwing bright dramatic shadows across the sitting room. 

“Is that what you want?” asks Aramis. 

“No,” says Porthos. He thinks about pushing Aramis against the wall, but instead just kisses him, reaches up to take his shoulders as an afterthought, pulling Aramis against him, swipes his thumb against the soft tendons of Ararmis’s neck. Aramis slides a hand against his waist to the low, vulnerable curve of his back, his mouth warm and open, the malty taste of beer in Porthos’s mouth. Aramis is so warm, but not frantic or afraid or distant, or any of the number of things Porthos imagined he might be, imagined himself might be. He’s just warm and solid, teeth and chin suddenly in the way. Porthos touches his mouth to the corner of Aramis’s laugh. Aramis’s hand is firm at his hip and his mouth very gentle and searching against Porthos’s. 

He rests his forehead against Aramis’s, closes his eyes when he realizes he’s out of breath, steadies himself. When he opens his eyes, Aramis is watching him and Porthos doesn’t -- he tugs him back, kisses him again, ducks to his throat, listens to the sound of Aramis’s low hum, finds his pulse beneath his jaw. 

“I should go,” Porthos says, soft. He feels Aramis swallow, steps back. 

On the walk back, feeling exposed under the light of the moon, he clenches fingers to his palm to retain the warmth of Aramis there, imagines pinning Aramis under him and holding him down, knees bracketed on either side of Ararmis’s hips. 

*

Porthos stretches his back, winces. He’s been sparring with the stable boys, young bright things just the right height to bruise a kidney. He’s escaped to the top of the steps, watching them fell Leon, two, then three, against one, giving low cheers when one of them comes close to landing a hit, warning Leon of particularly underhanded youthful tricks. Leon beats two of them back back, fails to notice the third circling around behind. The eldest of the three, dark-haired boy of about ten or eleven, calls for his return to yard. Porthos holds his hands up in defeat, begging off due to his surely fatal injuries at their skilled hands.

“Surely even hardbitten warriors such as yourselves wouldn’t deny a dying man a meal and an hour’s rest,” says Treville coming up behind Porthos, startling one of the boys into dropping his foil. He settles next to Porthos as the railing, leans his weight on his hands. “Also,” he says, nodding to Leon dusting off his doublet, “your foe appears to be still standing.”

“Thanks,” says Porthos, sighing heavily. He still feels out of breath. “They’re ruthless.”

“Skill is no match for the unflagging energy of youth,” says Treville, watching the match with a narrow gaze. “You’ve done well here,” says Treville, voice warm and steady, although he appears wholly absorbed in where Leon’s leaving himself open, where the boys nearly strike a blow. “I know it can’t have been easy.” 

There’s a small scrabbling part of Porthos that wants to shrug, the part of him that thrives on having done it all and made it look easy. “It’s been all right,” he says, almost truthful. Then, “Thank you sir.”

Porthos feels more than sees the Captain start to say something, then stop, like he’s thought better of it, start again. “Aramis,” he settles on finally. Porthos keeps his face blank, knows the moment he does he’s giving himself away, mentally reviews any infractions Aramis may have committed in recent memory. It comes to him, abruptly, like walking down a staircase and finding there’s one fewer step than he’d realized, that he will lie to Treville if he has to.

“I mean,” says Treville in a slightly lighter tone that indicates Porthos’s mental panic has not gone unnoticed, “how does he seem? I know you are close.” 

Porthos nods, slowly, with the weight of the task. “He seems…” He thinks of Aramis’s pale face in the woods, fingers slick with blood, fat white flakes of snow in his hair; the careful, steady dip of his chin before taking a shot; the slow curve of his smile asking Porthos to stay. Porthos struggles for words, settles for, “Aramis. Ever Aramis.”

“Always Aramis,” agrees Treville, sounding like sometimes he’d rather otherwise. “I’ve often thought I should’ve paid him more mind after -- but then he had you,” he says, gentle.

“I suppose he did,” says Porthos, sounding to his own ears almost astonished. 

Treville straightens, clears his throat. “Porthos,” he says and when Porthos turns, Treville is standing with a hand on the doorframe. “You’re a fine Musketeer. And a finer man.” Porthos nods his thank you, makes his way down the stairs to the supper table, remembers playing cards with Aramis, dull-eyed and brittle, a bit of knotted silk lopsided around his head in the watery light of morning.

“What did Treville want?” asks Aramis, materializing out of the armory with a polish-damp rag. There’s a smear of grease on his cheek and above his eyebrow. 

“We were plotting your untimely demise,” says Porthos. “We reckon the amount of money we save soothing the egos of wounded husbands will give us -- oh, forty francs a year.”

“Come now,” says Aramis, wounded. “Sixty, at least.”

*

On Epiphany, Aramis, infallibly lucky, or simply incalculably crafty, takes a bite out of Porthos’s serving of king cake and winces. He pulls the charmed bean out of his mouth, complaining of a broken tooth, and is crowned king for the evening. He holds it aloft to Porthos like it’s a precious gift, a prize he’s daring Porthos to do something about. Porthos does, pulls Aramis to him the low shadows of the armory while their brothers sing terribly off-key raucous songs in the yard on this holy day, and kisses him. He feels Aramis’s smile against his mouth, tastes in his low sigh the victory of his patience being rewarded. 

“Easy,” says Aramis, back at his rooms, breathless, bright-eyed, when Porthos roughly pushes him back onto the bed with a strength that knocks the furniture. “You have sworn to protect me with your life.” 

“It was in my piece, so I rather believe I’m king,” says Porthos, sitting astride Aramis’s hips, pinning Aramis’s hands on either side of his head, leans down so they’re nose to nose, “And you have sworn to protect me.”

“Too late, I’ve staged a coup while you—” Aramis’s words are lost in Porthos’s mouth when he dips down to kiss him, draws his nose against Aramis’s cheek. Porthos tastes the sugar and wine on Aramis’s tongue, the faint hint of almond when he skims his hands up Aramis’s chest, wanting badly to press his face against Aramis’s neck, hold himself there until he feels he can breathe again. 

He touches his mouth to the low juncture of Aramis’s shoulder, to the sharp point of his clavicle. He smells of sweat and horses and gun oil, of the chill of winter, of some hint of rosewater. Porthos spreads his hands wide on Aramis’s ribs, smirks at his flinch, files away his belly shying away for some leisurely morning. 

He tracks the flutter of Aramis’s pulse, rubbing his nose against Aramis’s cheek, sets his teeth against the edge of Aramis jaw. He shifts, feels Aramis startle, reach up to draw him closer, one knee hiking up to keep Porthos in place. “I want—” he starts, feeling dazed.

“Yes,” says Aramis immediately, breathing the word out in a shudder. 

Porthos lifts his head. Aramis’s eyes are closed, lashes very dark, and Porthos is reminded, suddenly, of Aramis’s shuffling through expressions like a deck of cards. “I want you to give me your pistol,” he says. 

Aramis’s face creases; he opens his eyes. “Porthos,” he says, disapproving, exasperated, distracted now. There’s color high on his cheeks and neck, mouth red, eyes a bit bright with wine and the high of his own cleverness, but he mostly looks irritated.

Porthos kisses the line between his brows. “Worth a try,” he says and Aramis is still rolling his eyes when Porthos drags him up for a kiss. 

*

Three days after Epiphany, Porthos arrives at the Musketeer garrison to find Aramis leaning against a stable post, watching a swordfight between Leon and thin man with sloped shoulders and a dispassionate expression. The yard is alive with good cheer, money rapidly exchanging hands as wagers are placed on the outcome of the match. “Good morning,” says Aramis, eyes narrowed, without taking his eyes off the match. “Fresh meat.”

Porthos watches Leon go stumbling to one knee, narrowly avoiding taking a bystander down with him. The new recruit pauses for just a hair's breadth to let Leon collect himself, so short Porthos almost misses it. “Nice footwork,” he says. He’s aggressive, intercepting and counter-striking with his whole body as leverage. “Excellent technique.” 

“I’ve called winner.” Aramis straightens, stretches his shoulders back as Leon goes down again; this time the man doesn’t hesitate. Direct hit: dead. 

Aramis takes position. Porthos looks between Aramis’s dear, familiar smile and the stranger’s flat expression, his shuttered eyes. “Leon,” he calls to the poor man, wiping his face with a damp cloth, and Aramis turns to give him a look of betrayal before he even finishes. “I’ll bet your mattress on our new friend here.”

“I imagine this is how Caesar felt,” says Aramis. 

“Never fear, friend, we shall split my winnings to soothe your ego,” says Porthos and a ghost, barely a flicker, of a smirk crosses the stranger’s face when he raises his sword and takes a bow. Porthos takes a breath, releases it at the first ringing clash of metal. The yard fills with the low murmur of men’s voices, the scrape of swords, the nattering of horses, the broad, deep rumble of Porthos’s laugh when Aramis goes windmilling backward into the mud.

**Author's Note:**

> this was borne out of my desire to write a love letter to porthos, but i fear my baser instincts have betrayed me and it’s clear who this is really a love letter to. feedback welcome. goldenfiligree @ tumblr for emotional tag ruminations on the gray streaks in cabrera's beard.


End file.
